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Video Poker Question about progressive video poker machines

I thought of this nagging question I've had when reading a recent trip report where someone hit a royal on a progressive machine. The payout was ~1031 units betting max coins.

I don't play much video poker maybe I'm missing something...I thought the whole point of playing max coins was for the rare occasions when you hit the royal flush so you can get the disproportionately higher payout. In other words, at one coin a royal is 250, at two units it's 500 and so on so its 750 at three units, 1000 at four units. But at five units, instead 1250, it's 4000. In order to have a chance at this disproportionately large payout, you need to bet max units.

So why would someone bet max coins when the royal flush is only 1031 instead of 4000? That's less than even the 1250 it should be if it was just proportional to all other payouts in the game. Wouldn't you be better off betting 4 coins?

TheCarve is correct, the progressive is usually referred to in dollar amounts, in your case it would be quarters for a jackpot of $1,031. Once the royal is hit, it resets (starts over) at $1,000 (4000 units), and every bet/wager made on the progressive bank increases the jackpot by a small amount.

I've read that on a regular machine, hitting a Royal on JoB is about 1 in 80:000. How much harder is it to hit a royal on Progressive?

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It's not any harder to hit a royal.

The odds are about 1 in 40,000 for JoB regardless of progressive or not. The difference with the progressive machines is that part of your coin in is added to the progressive total, making the overall expected return slightly higher than a normal machine.

So all things being equal, I'll sit down at a progressive machine. I've hit royals 5 times this year on them, and strangely none on non-progressive machines, though the play has been equally spread among both.

So what you're saying is that if I have a regular JoB machine and a Progressive JoB machine sitting right next to each other, I should sit down and play the Progressive one?

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All thing being equal - yes, play the progressive.

Unfortunately, it usually isn't that simple. Often, progressives will have poorer paytables than the non-progressive games. So you have to have some understanding of how big the progressive has to get to overcome the reduced paytables.

That is, if overall expected value is the most important thing to you. (I'll admit, I've played a few progressives that had a slightly lower EV than their non-progressive counterparts just because that jackpot looked so enticing.)

I have a theory on the best way to increase your odds of hitting the DDB Progressive, follow me around and when I'm done playing, you start. Both progressives at Palms I was chasing in October hit right after I was done lol

So fullpay Jacks 9/6 has 99.54 payback , so a progressive of around $1250 makes it over 100percent?

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Yes, the "break even point" (100% return) for 9/6 jacks is with a $1220 Royal. However progressive machines with 9/6 Jacks are difficult to find. Much more likely to find an 8/5 DDB with a progressive royal. But since that game only pays 96.79% with a $1000 royal, the game needs to have a $2378.75 Royal to break even.

To answer one of your earlier questions, a good rule of thumb to evaluate the value of a royal progressive, imo, is to consider every $500/$2000 added to the royal on a quarter/dollar machine to be worth one full house/flush paytable "notch" which is worth about 1.1%.

Also, a few earlier posters have said the probability of hitting the royal remains the same whether you play either machine. This is only true if you do not change your strategy based on the royal value, which would be a mistake for significant progressives.

For example, if you're playing 9/5 quarter JoB with a $1500 royal, it's correct to hold 3 to a royal over any high pair. This plus other adjustments increases the probability of a royal from 1 in 40,390 for standard 9/6 JoB to 1 in 33,677 in this progressive scenario.